I’ve been wanting to learn the Mesh paint mode In UE5.7 but kind of struggling to get my head around the Mesh Paint Methods, in my head it seems Texture Color is better then Vertex Painting because you don’t have to deal with adding more vertices on your mesh instead you have to deal with textures.
So in what cases should someone use the Vertex Painting instead of Texture Color and vis versa?
and what are the performance difference between the two?
welcome to the forum.
and well… using vertex color and texture blending you conserve memory. instead of baking a high res and repeating texture you paint in some texture blend values and get basicly “procedurally” generated detail.
take a 8 x 4 meter wall. with a mix of brick, moss, chipped paint and dirt. to bake it you’d have to say bake 2 4k textures (including normal and data maps). using the vertex paint workflow and higher res geometry, you can do it with like 4 1k textures for the brick, moss, paint and dirt and some blend masks. and you paint the blends for details and alterations.
this workflow comes with a runtime cost, cause you have to take more texture samples for the whole blend, but the details are basicly “infinite” without repetition (if you are a good artist).
Thanks for the info.
I’m just wondering though in the Mesh Paint Mode the “Texture Color“ creates a new texture, which I believe is a “VirtualTexture” to make the blending effect between the 2 textures (Brick and moss or etc.) and you can increase the texture resolution size to make the blending effect better, so you don’t have to worry about adding additional vertices for a better blend.
While Vertex Painting relies on vertices for the blending between the 2 textures, the more vertices you have the better the blending can be.
Between the 2 options I’m wondering multiple things 1: Performance for them (Does one run better then the other?). 2: why would someone use Vertex Painting over Texture Color and vis versa?
well… dirty blender shot. using 1 rgba vertex color you can blend upto 5 materials with independent blend modulate texture projections/mappings. that’s more procedural and gives a diffferent variety. while painting the blend modulate texture in engine is nice to author, you’re stuck at that one mapping and blend and have to generate a new blend texture for every piece you blend. increases texture memory. vertex color has a lower amount of data.
on the shader level they are kinda equal. you gotta account for all texture samples either way.
